This week’s episode features a conversation with Catherine Tabor, the founder and CEO of Sparkfly, a company that helps brands with marketing and customer engagement. Tabor talked about building a company fluid enough to adapt to changing technology trends over the last decade and how she was dismissed by venture capitalists despite landing notable customers. Plus, she talked about her leadership style and why she has a 1:1 meeting with every employee once a quarter.

As a founder, you’ve got to be ready for anything, but nothing could have prepared Mercury CEO and founder Immad Akhund for the rapid growth his company experienced after the SVB bank crisis. We’re mixing it up this week and sharing an interview from our sister podcast, Equity. TechCrunch fintech reporter Mary Ann Azevedo talks with Akhund about how they onboarded a record number of startup customers and helped guide their current users through the SVB bank crash, how he thinks about fundraising and investing during this downturn, and how he thinks about standing out against competitors like Brex. Be sure to check out the Eye on AI. You can find them at https://pod.link/1438378439 or on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@eyeonai3425.

This week’s episode features Charles Baron, the co-founder and CMO at Farmers Business Network (FBN), a startup that offers a suite of online services to farmers. Baron talked about what led him — a former venture capitalist — to want to build in the agtech space. He talked about why the company chose to expand into multiple verticals quickly and how big of a need there was for what FBN offers.

On today’s episode, we hear from the founders of Spout, a startup that makes a device that can pull fresh drinking water out of the air. Co-founder Reuben Vollmer talked about trying and failing to get the company off the ground for years before meeting his co-founder Tyler Brenton. Both talked about how important getting the design of the product right is and how big of a need there is for a product like Spout.

This week’s episode features Web Sun, the co-founder and president of Komodo Health, a startup that uses data to create a comprehensive map of the U.S. healthcare system. Web talked about what drove him to entrepreneurship and how mutual friends introduced him to his co-founder thinking they’d get along — little did they know. He also talked about navigating fundraising during the bull market and layoffs. Plus, Becca and Dom talk about their remaining questions after the interview.

This week we hear from Amy Brown, the co-founder and CEO of Authenticx, a Midwestern startup that helps insurance companies and medical organizations extract data from their call centers using AI. Amy told Becca and Dom about how her background working in the same call centers inspired her to foray into entrepreneurship. She also talked about the sacrifices and very human side of being an entrepreneur and how they were very intentional when building their AI model.

On this week's episode, Dom and Becca are joined by Eli Ben-Joseph, the co-founder and CEO of Regard, a startup that uses AI to streamline the clinical side of medicine that's hoping to reduce physician burnout. Eli talked about his journey from deciding to forgo attending medical school because of the very issue he then decided to build a company to fix years later. He also talked about why it was important for them to build an AI model that requires a human touch and what it is like to sell to hospitals.

On today’s episode, Becca and Dom chat with Dr. Stacy Blain, the co-founder and chief science officer at Concarlo Therapeutics. Blain talked about how she had been researching how to cure drug-resistant cancers before she accidentally found her way into entrepreneurship after her academic grants started getting denied. She also talked about why scientists make great founders and how the importance of the company’s mission is not lost on her

This week, Becca and Dom are joined by Sarah Sandnes, the co-founder and CTO of SafetyWing, which is creating a global safety net for remote workers. Sandnes is a digital nomad herself, so she understands the frustrations of frequently crossing borders and how difficult it can be to find affordable and high-quality health insurance as an employee. She also talked about how she and her co-founders have built a fully remote company that spans almost the entire globe -- because even digital nomads deal with time-zone frustrations.

This week Becca and Dom are joined by Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, the co-founder and CEO at Samooha, a startup creating the infrastructure needed for data collaboration. Kamakshi talked about what it is like being a repeat founder in a male-dominated technical field. She talked about juggling being a parent and a company leader and how she thinks being a mother makes her a better entrepreneur. Plus, she talked about what may be the wildest startup acquisition story we’ve heard yet.

Exciting news this week! Dominic-Madori Davis is joining Becca Szkutak as Found’s newest co-host. Say hi to her in a review or tweet us @found. In this week’s episode, we are talking with the co-founders who are reimagining boxed wine. Boxed wine hasn’t typically been thought of as aesthetically pleasing or particularly delicious, but Juliet co-founders Allison Luvera and Lauren De Niro Pipher, are on a mission to change that. According to the co-founders, glass bottles serve nothing but tradition and are a sustainability nightmare. So they dove into rebranding boxed wine with their elevated design and carefully selected profiles.

Getting diagnosed with a learning disability or attention disorder is crucial to getting students the support they need to be successful in the classroom, however, the assessments are extremely cost and time prohibitive. This week on Found Darrell and Becca are talking with Stefan Bauer about how Marker Learning is cutting the cost of learning disability assessments by conducting them remotely, how they’ve successfully worked with school districts to help them test their required amount of students, and the potential to take Marker Learning into the prison system to assess incarcerated people and provide them with tools to learn in a way that’s better suited to their abilities. We also say goodbye to Darrell as a regular host of Found this week, but don’t worry you can still catch him every Friday on The TechCrunch Podcast!

We’re coming at you live from TechCrunch’s Early Stage in Boston. Darrell and Becca are joined onstage by Russ Wilcox who founded E Ink and is currently a partner at Pillar VC. They discussed how Russ navigated multiple economic downturns and eventually sold E Ink to Amazon, why he made the change from Founder to VC, and how he can usually tell within the first two minutes of a meeting if he will invest.

Welcome back to Found, the TechCrunch podcast where you hear the stories behind the startups from the entrepreneurs themselves. In this week’s episode, Trevor Martin co-founder of Mammoth Biosciences comes on to discuss how the company is using CRISPR systems to detect and cure genetic diseases. He talks with Darrell and Becca about using the importance of transparency when creating innovative medical technology, using CRISPR to build therapies that will help patients in the real world, and what funding looks like for a company that has a long road to profitability.

We’re thrilled to be nominated for a Webby award in the Best Technology Podcast category. You can help Found win by voting atvote.webbyawards.com. Voting closes April 20.

On today’s episode, Lauren Markler comes on to talk about how her company Cofertility aims to rebrand egg donation by making the process less transactional and much more affordable. She talks with Darrell and Becca about scaling while maintaining a personal touch, building a company remotely, fand inding cofounders that align on the company mission and prioritizing motherhood while building a company.

This week Becca is joined by special guest co-host TechCrunch reporter Amanda Silberling to talk with Sarah Peterson, COO and co-founder of The Nudge which is a text-based app that helps you make the best plan in your city. They get into the benefits of a sibling/co-founder relations, how to build trust with a user, and why everyone needs that planner friend in the friend group.

This week Darrell and Becca are joined by Angela Hoover, CEO and co-founder of Andi, a generative AI search chatbox company. Angela and our hosts talk about building in generative AI before Chat GPT made it cool, how she went from working in construction to starting an artificial intelligence company, and how the Andi team plans to use the momentum in the AI space to reach their next goals.

Ben Lamm is no stranger to starting an interesting company but Colossal Biosciences, the world’s first de-extinction company is definitely the most sci-fi startup we’ve seen yet. This week on Found he talks with Darrell and Becca about what it means to bring back the infamous Wholly Mammoth, knowingly dumb Dodo, Australian massacred Thylacine; and what this means for conservation, how they secured VC funding despite being a long way away from profitability, and why they structure the company like a typical SaaS startup.

Welcome back to Found, the TechCrunch podcast where you hear the stories behind the startups from the entrepreneurs themselves. This week we’re talking to Teddy Solomon, the co-founder of Fizz, a social media app aimed at college students focusing on building community on campus. For this interview, we’re joined by TechCrunch social media expert, Amanda Silberling. Darrell, Amanda, and Teddy discuss what Gen Z is looking for in their social media, how to thoroughly moderate the platform, and how this kind of community building could go far beyond colleges.

While working on developing the iPhone and then going on to co-found Nest, Matt Rogers became an expert in changing consumer behavior on a mass scale by creating products that seamlessly fit into everyday life. In his newest venture, he’s turned his sights to solving food waste starting in the kitchen. Mill sends customers a trash can that dries and shrinks kitchen scraps so they can be sent back to be used for animal feed. In this episode, Matt, Darrell, and Becca talk about thinking through every part of the customer experience from packaging to sending back their food waste, why he prefers starting a company to investing in one, and what decisions he thinks defined his previous companies.

It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for—the winner is announced! In this episode, we get to know the winner of the 2022 Startup Battlefield competition. We’ll hear what’s next for their company and get insight from TechCrunch staff, VCs, and audience members on why they were the right choice. Be sure to check out all of the other podcasts in the TechCrunch Podcast Network: Found, Equity, The TechCrunch Podcast, Chain Reaction and The TechCrunch Live Podcast.

Last year when we talked to Alice Albrecht from Re:collect, the Found team couldn't stop thinking about the possibilities of a tool like Re:collect, so we're sharing this episode again. Re:collect is a software tool that augments creativity by helping people focus, recall, and connects their ideas. The conversation covered a lot of ground from how to hone your pitch when your product is so cerebral, how technology can help creativity but Alice argues will never replace it, and how developing AI requires building safeguards from the jump.

Inside Startup Battlefield is back in our feed with episode three. It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for—the winner is announced! In this episode, we get to know the winner of the 2022 Startup Battlefield competition. We’ll hear what’s next for their company and get insight from TechCrunch staff, VCs, and audience members on why they were the right choice. New episodes of Inside Startup Battlefield drop every Monday. Be sure to check out all of the other podcasts in the TechCrunch Podcast Network: Found, Equity, The TechCrunch Podcast, Chain Reaction and The TechCrunch Live Podcast.

Michael Chime, the co-founder and CEO of Prepared, is leading the charge to modernize 911 calls by providing access to video and photos. Most people are calling in emergencies with their smartphones so the Prepared team is working to help dispatchers have all the data possible to relay to first responders. In today’s episode, they talk about implementing this new tech in an industry that’s slow to innovate, navigating privacy concerns when capturing and collecting videos of emergencies, and how he’s grown into the CEO role as the company has expanded.